Win7 for Developers – Troubleshooting & Windows Error Reporting

  • Article

Today we covered a lot of ground where the rubber hits the street in application failure & recovery. Kevin Hill joined me to talk about what happens to that data after it leaves your machine and showed us how to use it to help solve the issues that cause the problems. We also talked about psr.exe (Problem Step Recovery) as a tool to capture what caused a crash, and how to use the troubleshooting packs to design scripts to make your application appear to be self healing.

Troubleshooting Pack Designer. In the Win7 SDK there’s a Troubleshooting Pack designer that makes it easy to create the “Try this…” scripts that the user can choose to run to resolve their issue. These scripts are based on Powershell and can include logic to go thru a variety of scenarios based on logic you define.

Windows Error Reporting. So what happens after the fact? Where does that collected information you click “Send to Microsoft” go? Kevin Hill showed us how to get to that information and report against our registered applications to see where failures are happening and help us troubleshoot and resolve those issues.

Links of interest…